Lord have mercy, am I ever tired of this malevolent piece of shit software… (and spare me any thoughts about replacing it with a hand-crafted lossless FLAC archive or fucking Spotify or whatever floats YOUR particular boat; I've been ripping my own music into and buying music through iTunes since it came out 16 fucking years ago, I'm not spending the time and money that would be necessary to recreate my library anywhere else right now. iTunes is my goddamned wife, and we're married in a country that doesn't recognize divorce. So be it).
I was checking the iTunes Store this week for a rare track by Clutch (pronounced: FUCKING. CLUTCH.) that I saw on YouTube and that I wished, if it were available, to purchase for my own library. It wasn't, but I saw that there was a Deluxe Edition of their last studio album, which I already own, that features three bonus tracks, which I do not.
So I bought just those three tracks, to complete the whole album.
iTunes, in its infinite retardation, loaded them up into the library as so:
Yes. These are DEFINITELY two unrelated albums. For certain.
Okay, fine. One set of tracks is called THING and the other is THING (Deluxe). And maybe there's some colossal sperglord out there who would want these two things kept separate. I, however, being a normal goddamned human being, do not. I mean, fuck's sake, it even knows that the track #s on the latter three tracks proceed directly from the first twelve. THIS IS ALL ONE GODDAMNED ALBUM, ITUNES. So, in any other music managing app in the world, to correct this one would simply:
- select all tracks
- edit their info
- force one album title onto all fifteen tracks, which:
- will make any non-mongoloid music app understand that "oh hey, duder wants these to all be considered one album. Done"
iTunes, being a special snowflake, considered my request to lump these into one album and gave me this:
wut
How in the actual fuck it decided that tracks 9-15 are an album by a band called Clutch named Psychic Warfare that is completely different and separate from the album by a band called Clutch named Psychic Warfare that contains tracks 1-8 is a mystery that I will never solved short of kidnapping the entire iTunes development team from the last 20 years and locking them into a torture-filled Skinner Box of my own devising until they spit out the truth.
Now, I've been wrestling in the mud with iTunes for a looooong fucking time at this point. Even after the Great Purge of 2006 (am I mildly ashamed at the number of live U2 bootlegs and Cleopatra Records "re-recordings" of 80's cock rock greats by the middle-aged current versions of same that I had? Yes), or the Lesser Purge of 2012 (when I, and millions of other people, quietly deleted that Gotye album that, aside from that one tune, really, really sucked), I'm still sitting at about 17,000 songs and 140GB of music. So, I've learned a few tricks along the way to make it behave. Sometimes.
One thing you can do is right-click and GET INFO and change not just the album name, but go into the SORTING OPTIONS and try applying the album name to the SORT AS field, which is usually blank. I did that here and…
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKK
This has NEVER been reproducible or reliable, so sometimes you just have to do it a few times and see if it ever gets it right. Which is fucking infuriating, but what are you gonna do? You're going to try it again, that's what you're going to do. And, eventually, maybe, if the moon is aligned correctly and a cat is having its period within a 2 mile radius, maybe, just maybe, it'll work:
There. Was that so fucking hard? Yes. Yes it was.
As an aside, I do use Google Music just as a last-ditch backup dump for all of my music. I use their Music Manager to automatically upload anything new that shows up in my iTunes to Google Music. On a whim, I decided to see how it treated this same scenario:
Oh, bother.
So, Google Music, too, thinks these are two separate albums. Great. Let's try fixing that. Click the little … icon and change the album name from "Psychic Warfare (Deluxe)" to just "Psychic Warfare" and click enter…
Well then.
THAT WAS FUCKING EASY. SURE WISH APPLE COULD FIGURE OUT WHAT THEIR PRIMARY COMPETITOR HAS. Not that Google Music doesn't have a ton of other problems (playlists capped at 1000 songs is the biggie for me), but this kind of simple shit should automatically work in any app that purports to be a music library manager or player. Maybe just switching to the new-ish Apple Music would be easiHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAican'tevenfinishthatsentenceAppleMusicisadumpsterfire.
shawn ritchie dot com 